


For Once, Then, Something

by The_Carnivorous_Muffin



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Attempted Murder, Friendship, Gen, Murder, Revolution, Tragedy, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-03
Updated: 2018-08-05
Packaged: 2019-06-21 11:06:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15556356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Carnivorous_Muffin/pseuds/The_Carnivorous_Muffin
Summary: An eleven year old Harry Potter, friendless and dead to wizarding Britain, continues to desperately throw his own in with one of Voldemort's many soul fragments. The scent of war and revolution on the wind only grows stronger. Sequel to Tozette's "Hit the Ground Running"





	1. Chapter 1

The Fall of Magical Britain and the Subsequent Rise of the British Magical Empire

Harry James Potter 

* * *

Preface

* * *

 I would like to write this as a history text, as an objective view of history, but after much thought and far too much time on my hands I must make it a memoir.

Strangely enough history to me has never been history, it’s never been the Goblin wars, Grindelwald, or anything so distant yet strangely influential as that. It could be the way it was presented to me, as the first meaningful and real thing I ever knew, but history to me is always so much more than what anyone else I know presents it as.

The first books I bought for myself, at the prompting of someone else but still on my own, were history books about a world that seemed so grand and filled with possibility. I didn’t always understand them, not then, I was only eleven at the time but I read them none the less and the figures in them were so real to me it was as if life had been breathed into them.

There is also me though, I have my own niche in history, and as much as I would sometimes like to I can’t ignore that.

History is so immersed in my being that I am barely a person, I am an idea and a concept before I am a person, I think it’s easier that way for most people to deal with me.

Of course, there are always exceptions. The dark lord being chief among them, but then, the dark lord has always been the dark lord… And that I suppose is that. When it comes to him, say what you like about his morals or his methods or anything else but you must admit that he is wholly himself. It’s like he’s a hurricane, an unstoppable force that comes and goes, something you live with rather than deal with.

That was Dumbledore’s great error, after all, mistaking the dark lord for Grindlewald; something that could be defeated, with great difficulty and much bloodshed, but something that could be appealed to or else worn down.

I could write books on the dark lord, perhaps that’s what this work truly is, not a memoir, or a history of England, but rather a history of him. Sometimes it’s hard to tell where he ends and I begin, that’s what the trouble has always been, I think.

I doubt he feels the same way, he never does seem to _feel_ the way I do or anyone else for that matter, concepts like self don’t seem to bother him or if they do it is only a faint irritation where this issue consumes me.

Let it never be said that the dark lord is partial to philosophy.

If I have any readers, other than him or me, (if this book is ever published which I highly doubt) I am certain that there will be more than a few complaints that this is fundamentally untrue. How can the dark lord, the emperor of a nation who turned the previous government on its head, who began the conquest of Europe within only a few short years of taking the ministry, whose views on muggle borns and muggle culture has been so influential and controversial not be at least somewhat partial to philosophy?

I can answer this in many ways but I think the most telling is the basic fact that upon finding himself trapped in the head of a child whom he had sought to kill, existing as a fragment of himself, his only thought was not, “Who am I?” or “What is the purpose of my existence?” but rather, “Goddammit I need a body back so that I can take over England.” 

I’m paraphrasing here but the thought remains.

And the truly sad thing is that this is not considered an insult to him, not even a mild one, he will most likely read past that without a second glance because to him it’s so very true that it means nothing. There’s no point in wasting thought over it and other trifles like it, that which is not material, or does not eventually manifest itself in the material are useless.

Thus speaks Voldemort.

Harry doesn’t speak like that, he never has, not since he was ten and even before that. Harry has always thought about what it means to be Harry or not Harry or if Harry as a concept should even be considered.

I, self, me, it’s all a funny fuzzy idea, isn’t it?

I digress though, there are other things to cover, and no doubt I’ll come back to these thoughts in time.

There is the small but far from negligible fact that this will most likely not make it through censorship, will probably not even be declared as contraband, after all I only plan to present it to him first. If he wishes to publish it, which is unlikely given its lack of propaganda and its presentation of events that have been written out of history, then he will do so but if he doesn’t well… This is how things usually end between us.

To tell the truth I’m not certain I want other readers, what would I do with them, and perhaps more importantly what would they do with me? I can just see it now, my life held in Hermione Granger’s hands, tearing through the pages with red pen cross-referencing this and that and if I am up to par citing me directly and so thoroughly that my words mean nothing.

Reduced once again to the boy who lived who was written in both _Modern Magical History_ and _Great Wizarding Events of the Twentieth Century_ , Merlin preserve me.

Although, perhaps she is not the best example, given her current situation I am more than certain that she would burn the book simply because it is written by me without even taking a look inside. It’s odd, she meant so little to me when I actually attended Hogwarts, but I remember the last time I saw her. Years later, the way her eyes burned when she looked at me, filled with such resentment, betrayal, and anguish that I cannot think on what she saw in my place.

Intelligent, if her school records were anything to look at, but she never understood. Not that anyone did or does or perhaps even can, understanding requires some similar circumstances after all, and things being as they are I have more in common with products of literature than real people.

So instead I write a story for myself, and perhaps for a dark lord when he’s bored enough to sit down and read it, and perhaps it will last one thousand and one nights and perhaps it will last less.

I can only tell you when it starts.

To me it has always been self-evident that the beginning of the end was not the first wizarding war or the second, but rather June of 1991 when a boy almost starved to death in a cupboard and met the peculiar man who lived inside his head.

* * *

 Berlin 1997 

* * *

Harry wasn’t sure if it was irony, there was certainly some word for it that slipped through his fingertips, but fifty years after the defeat of Grindlewald he was watching as Germany was being burned and ravaged by an English dark lord.

It was, at the very least, an interesting thought.

So there he was, on the balcony with his unfinished manuscripts beside him, staring down at the streets that were still scorched from the week’s activities and the sounds of Englishmen marching through magical Berlin with all the enthusiasm that comes with nationalism. Among them were few Death Eaters, noted only by a slight difference in uniform, looking more like storm troopers than the cult members they had been originally conceived as.

Most of the signs of the original death eaters, the masks, the dark mark, the religious elements to it, had been taken out and rewritten with Voldemort’s reemergence. It served its purpose but it had outlived its time, a new revolution was needed, or so Voldemort had phrased it. It was partially true but there was also the fact that Voldemort was almost embarrassed by them, by these middle aged ragged cultists who kissed his feet and acted as if he was a god, gathering the troops together he could only look at them and think how pitiful they truly were. It also served to mark him from the Voldemort he had been, the one in Harry’s head as well as the one outside of it, to make him into a new Voldemort that was the same as the others yet somehow different.

Harry had always thought he would be better off choosing a different name but that went too far into the question of self for the dark lord’s tastes. At the age of sixteen he had written “I am Lord Voldemort” and he had remained thus ever since no matter how many Voldemorts there were running around at the same time.

It was his troops, these latest troops that still looked at him with too much fervor in their eyes, who were in Germany now.

The pounding of the feet on the cobblestone almost formed an erratic drum beat, mimicked poorly by Harry’s tapping quill. He had days like this before, not quite the same, not this eerie silence where he was so terribly removed from it all but there had been similar moments.

There had been the fall of London, of Paris, of Vienna, of Prague, of Madrid, and so very many others. They all had their distinct flavor, the chaos and heart wrenching that had been England, the shock that had been Paris, but sometimes they blended together until they seemed so very similar as if they were all part of the same surreal dream.

And all the while there was that feeling, not dread but something disconcerting all the same, that there were still very many more cities to go in Europe and perhaps even beyond.

Immortality gave someone quite a bit of time, and Voldemort (no matter his form) had always been time efficient. Harry didn’t think he had counted on that, in his desperate race against death, he didn’t realize how very easy he would accomplish everything he had set out to do and for now he seemed to remain the same as he always had. Ennui was an unfamiliar concept to him, still unfamiliar as there were other magical nations to conquer and correct, other ancient secrets to learn and pry open, and simply a world of things to do that didn’t leave one time to contemplate the meaning of life and eternity.

He and Voldemort were very different people, of course Voldemort and most people were very different people, but he felt having known the dark lord the best he had more of a right to make that statement than anyone else.

Harry was always thinking about time, death, and just being and he always had too much time on his hands.

A shadow fell over him, he looked up to see the sixteen year old persona of Voldemort (never to be called Tom Riddle) frowning down at him. Whether he had been following Harry’s thoughts closely was left to debate, it was safer to assume that everything Harry thought he stored somewhere for later use but it was somewhat unrealistic, most of the time Harry’s thoughts bored him. He supposed it was just as well because philosophy was one of the few things he could think about that would keep Voldemort out of his head.

The dark lord moved over to the table and picked up the manuscript, his eyes flicking through it, and then without preamble said, “It will never be published.”

There wasn’t much there, just the preface, Harry hadn’t set about writing the actual content yet but he shrugged. “I didn’t really expect it to be. It’s not for them anyway.”

“Then why write it?” And there it was that direct forceful lack of understanding, where if it served no purpose then there was no purpose in doing it, and Harry couldn’t help but smile bitterly back at the young man.

“Well, I suppose I’m just getting a little bored.” He said pausing over his words, for the dark lord they would be true enough. And they were true, he had been bored lately, not that he enjoyed when things were hard and his life dangled by a thread but it had been distracting enough to keep him from thinking on other things.

It was better when he was distracted.

“There are plenty more useful things you could be doing instead.” Voldemort observed with a sigh as he leaned over the railing to observe the progress of the troops, “You could be down there with them, had you been we may have been finished here weeks ago.”

“Perhaps.” Harry said and they let it drop.

He wouldn’t say that Voldemort cared for him, any more than he cared for his other pawns, sentimentality escaped him in almost every regard but Voldemort did value him as a chess piece. Harry was a very different piece from those on the ground for a myriad of reasons, and for that Voldemort liked to keep him close by, Harry was his ace in the hole and you didn’t play all your cards until you had to.

What was it he had said, years before when they had been fleeing Hogwarts with only the clothes on his back, a wand, and a red stone, _“I do need a set of hands…”_

It was as true now as it was then, it was just less obvious to the casual observer, and for that reason it was only on very rare occasions that Harry was sent out with the Death Eaters and the masses to pillage and sack lesser states.

In the back of his head, where the phantom thoughts of Voldemort still occasionally lingered, he caught the slowly building plans of where to go from Germany, which nation to take next, whether they had the manpower to take Russia quickly or if they should try elsewhere first. Even with Berlin still burning and screaming beneath them he was already on to the next conquest, no doubt having placed in his mind some loyal and vaguely competent Death Eater onto the throne and letting them deal with the political fallout.

“Don’t pretend you’re content either, Harry.” Voldemort’s snide voice cut in across his thoughts and Harry turned to catch those sharp blue eyes boring into him.

What a shock that had been, blue eyes, he had always imagined them red. Then, there had been that first time, when he was ten that he saw Voldemort inside his head but he couldn’t remember the color only the texture. In that they had always remained, hard and so terribly sharp.

“You’re right, that would be hypocritical of me.” Harry murmured still trying to stray away from responding to Voldemort in his head.

That had taken years to correct, the first few months had been almost totally silent between them, only when Voldemort had insisted on becoming political once again did they realize that they barely spoke with one another. Sometimes it was beneficial, it was eerie like twins in a muggle horror film, but other times it left out too much information for the audience.

Besides, that mental link, well-worn and used served as a reminder for circumstances Voldemort would rather not think on.

So they watched in silence as Britain flooded the magical district from downtown to the ghetto, slowly but surely making its way to where Durmstang waited with the Eastern European wizards holed up inside wondering how it had ever come to this. What strange times they were living in, where war and sitting on the balcony went hand in hand, almost as if they were the same thing.

“You think far too much to be healthy.” Voldemort cut in before Harry could ponder that thought too far, and he was looking down at Harry again with an expression that Harry couldn’t name. On any other man it would be affection, perhaps even fondness, but even this younger incarnation of Voldemort, who had seemed slightly more human than the others, had only pale imitations of most human sentiment.

There were many theories on what Voldemort felt for whom but in the end Harry had thought it best to simply state that he didn’t know and that he might never know. Some things were ineffable after all.

“We’ve dawdled here long enough, cities don’t conquer themselves, you know.” And he turned walking back into the room and out of the building leaving Harry to stare after him for a moment. Inside, the German ministry building lay in shambles, papers and desks strewn about and bodies crumpled on the floor of those who had been brave enough to resist and foolish enough to think the dark lord would care.

Harry stepped quickly after him, eyes straightforward on the walls and not the floor or the desks where the corpses were still strewn about, and tried not to think about what it meant to be an idea rather than a man or even a boy.

Dumbledore had killed an eleven year old boy, had left him alone and abused in a cupboard for all his life, so that this future might not exist.

There was something to be said for that, small as it was, there was something to be said.


	2. Chapter 2

The Fall of Magical Britain and the Subsequent Rise of the British Magical Empire

Harry James Potter

* * *

Excerpt 

* * *

There are a few details one must understand about Flamel, the philosopher’s stone, as well as the incarnation of Voldemort that was present at the time for many of the events that occurred to seem logical.

There has only ever been one philosopher’s stone. Many have tried to create it, both muggles and wizards, but only Flamel ever succeeded and he has never shared his secrets or produced another.

Because of this there is an obsession with the stone. A powerful mythos surrounding it, one that has attracted many thieves over the centuries not limited to Voldemort, one that is so powerful that it overlooks a fundamental flaw in the act of theft. No one has any idea how the stone works merely that it does.

We only see the evidence of its success in Flamel and his wife’s longevity as well as their inexplicable wealth. There is no instruction manual though, no ancient text, no dark ritual, nothing detailing how to go about gaining immortality or gold.

At best it is a mildly useful paperweight.

Another small but crucial fact is that at this point the original Voldemort that I had known, my only friend at that point in my life, was gone and the one that remained was the younger, more inexperienced, and altogether more human fragment of his soul.

The Voldemort I found myself with as we fled England had only been sixteen when he had been siphoned off from his body and while he was highly intelligent, tenacious, and far beyond his peers he was still only sixteen. He was a schoolboy, his height of discovery had been finding the instructions to create horcruxes and then misinterpreting the results, he had not realized that there would be no clear English instructions for the philosopher’s stone, that it would involve alchemy a subject he had virtually no background in, and that it would take experimentation one would expect from a master who had been researching for decades.

He had only that fire within him, that fire of determination I have only known the dark lord to possess, a flame that not only lights the engine that is his heart but also ravages any doubt or hesitation that stands in his way.

“Get it done.” That’s all you really can expect from him at times.

For him, and thus for me, there was no room for reflection and the realization that it was not as easy as we had been lead to believe.

To put it simply we were in over our heads.

* * *

Prague 1992

* * *

Harry woke to the sound of his own erratic heartbeat and soft afternoon light cutting through the blinds onto his eyelids.

He’d had that dream again, the one he only started having after leaving Hogwarts and England. He never screamed after the dreams or during them, never said anything, he just would wake up dazed and confused and vaguely panicked.

It took him half a moment to realize that there was nothing covering him, that he wasn’t cold but rather was uncomfortably hot in the summer heat, that there was light on his eyelids and he could breathe.

He wasn’t being buried alive; that was the really important observation to have.

Voldemort in his head was silent, as he usually was during this little routine, the older Voldemort (the one he’d always called Voldemort first) probably would have said something but this younger one never did. He seemed to hesitate to touch anything to do with that, being buried and waking up to the feeling of dirt being expelled from his lungs, namely being put down and somehow coming back.

The truth was that Voldemort didn’t get it, he didn’t get why the killing curse hadn’t worked the first time, but he really didn’t get why it hadn’t the second. Or why it had, for a moment, because there was a moment there where Harry hadn’t been in there at all but if Harry wasn’t there then how could he have come back?

Instead the younger Voldemort spent the majority of his time thinking about the stone. Everything revolved around it, research, experiments, places to look, translations, everything worked toward the greater goal of getting the stone to work and Voldemort into a body even eating was only towards that overarching goal.

(Sometimes when Harry was too tired to function or even think properly he’d picture Voldemort going through a strange ritual where he had to first inspect the stone, then listen to the stone, and then even be the stone by imitating it. It never failed to bring on a migraine.)

Slowly Harry lifted himself into a sitting position, bare feet touching the hardwood floor, and with a tired glance took in his surroundings.

Two galleons hadn’t gone very far at the end of things; and the galleons they’d gotten out of Gringotts right before they left London hadn’t gone much further.

The first two had been spent even before they’d left London; on the very portkey that got them out of England and onto the main continent.

So it was with history notes, a limited supply of galleons, and a red stone worth more gold than anything in the world that Harry found himself in an unfamiliar country where they spoke an unfamiliar language.

(Voldemort probably would have known German, perhaps even Czech, the older one that was but he wasn’t there and even when Harry found himself thinking it he had to remind himself that it didn’t really matter.)

There were still some galleons remaining, what wasn’t spent on room and board, but nevertheless Harry eyed it daily wondering just how far it would get him and how far they needed it to get him. The inn room was cheap, located in Prague’s more narrow and disreputable magical districts, where they didn’t ask questions and they didn’t look twice at a twelve year old living on his own with a bag of gold. He’d never needed much food either, living on Dursley portions for years, but never the less the days wore on and Harry couldn’t help but think that as much as Voldemort was thinking and researching they were getting no closer to whatever secrets the stone contained.

_“I will find it, besides the stone is an infinite supply of wealth if you’d remember.”_ Voldemort’s voice cut into his thoughts, chiding but not too insulted, and that Harry felt was a sign in and of itself that he wasn’t quite sure where to start either.

Prague had alchemical history, an old magical district, and while it wasn’t quite as good as going straight to Flamel and getting the answers out of him it wasn’t a bad place to start. It was also one of the better places to hide in Europe from Dumbledore. France had been out of the question, as were some parts of Germany, for the first few hours Voldemort had considered going further east to Russia or perhaps even China.

Voldemort didn’t to say it but he hadn’t wanted to leave Europe either. This Voldemort, Harry knew without asking, had never left England. He knew they had to leave, that they had to go somewhere where a young Harry Potter wouldn’t get stares, but he hadn’t wanted to go somewhere unfamiliar altogether. If there had been some way to stay in England, to research and work with the stone there, then he would have done it.

For better or worse though they’d chosen Prague, travelling by various portkeys so that they couldn’t be traced, and they’d been there ever since.

Harry sighed, _“If you could solve the gold thing before the body thing…”_

That was unlikely though, as much as Voldemort probably needed to get their priorities straight he obsessed over getting a body, but then if Harry was stuck in someone else’s head or worse a diary he probably would be obsessed too.

_“If you wish for things to move along faster then I suggest you get things ready, there’s work to be done.”_

And just like they did every morning Harry crossed the room searching for chalk as well as old decaying texts that would be needed for the day’s experiments. The next few hours would be spent on his knees, sketching out painstakingly careful runes into the floor, listening to Voldemort’s instructions on this or that or magic in general and hoping that this would be the day.

This would be the day they got something working, he’d tell himself as he thought about the money in the corner and Albus Dumbledore still looking for him in England, this would be the day that they took some step in the right direction.

It had never been that day yet.

_“There has only ever been one philosopher’s stone and only one man to use it; we have the stone but we do not have the instructions. It will take time.”_ The younger Voldemort tried to be reasonable, not always, but sometimes. As it was there was still tenseness in the air as they each thought but never directly said that maybe, just maybe, things were going a bit off the rails. Not as much as at Hogwarts but still, not what Voldemort had originally planned either.

_“We don’t have time.”_ Harry couldn’t help but think sourly.

_“There is plenty of time, no shortage of it, as powerful as Albus Dumbledore is his reach does not extend into most of Europe.”_

Still, he made it sound like a few months, like by the end of summer they’d somehow figure it out and Harry was beginning to suspect it’d take years. It’d been alright at first, they’d found a place to stay, a place to buy books and even the books people didn’t want them buying but after that things had stalled.

It’d become painfully obvious that Voldemort didn’t really know what he was doing. Well, not completely, just that he’d thought it’d be easier. That was the trouble though, it wasn’t easy, and the more they looked up the less easy it was becoming. It was as if the more they learned, from the basics of Alchemy in that first week, to more advanced material in the weeks after, the more they realized just what a difficult problem it was.

On the plus side Voldemort had been right, he was learning far more here than he ever would have at Hogwarts. He’d known he probably wouldn’t stay at Hogwarts for more than a year, he and Voldemort (the Voldemort he had known first) had never really talked about it but it’d seemed pretty clear that once they’d gotten the stone they’d have to leave the country fast before Dumbledore caught on. The Malfoys, the politics, that had never really been the focus and he’d known that. He’d accepted that, he’d just thought that leaving would have been a little easier, or at the very least that Voldemort would have had some sort of plan.

The younger Voldemort didn’t know how exactly the legalities worked between the Goblins and the ministry, what the laws were with legally dead people coming to claim their vaults, or even expatriate fugitives trying to get galleons (because Dumbledore couldn’t simply leave him as missing without some reason behind it even when he found an empty grave). He didn’t know if there could be a leak in Gringotts with the employees and so it had become safer to leave the vault alone completely rather than withdraw and rely on the Potter funds while abroad.

It was only after reading through heavy books on runes, a subject Harry didn’t even know existed when he was at Hogwarts, that they’d even managed to remove the trace from his wand.

Voldemort wasn’t saying anything to any of this, just sort of pacing in his head, listening intently but attempting to ignore it as if it was some obnoxious fly buzzing in his ear. Harry’s familiar headache was coming back though, even as he concentrated on drawing perfect circles, the exact shape of the runes, but it was something that needed to be said.

_“And what precisely do you think should be done? The stone is the priority, defending yourself and thus me should the occasion arise is a priority, what happened before the Mirror of Erised cannot be allowed to happen again.”_

Harry almost flinched at that, as if it was somehow his fault that as an eleven year old he hadn’t managed to defeat Albus Dumbledore. He grimaced instead, the younger Voldemort didn’t really mean that, the older one might have if he had been around instead but the younger one didn’t. It was that frayed edge coming from frustration that was leaking through; so Harry did his best to ignore it.

Harry finished before responding, over the weeks he’d grown faster at drawing the runes, but that just meant he’d be drawing more later when this batch failed to produce anything, _“Eating is also important, I can’t read or learn, or even do this stuff if we don’t have food and we can’t pay rent. I need a job.”_

There may be only so many hours in a day, and so many hours in a night considering the younger Voldemort was almost as harsh of a task master as the older one had been, but still money was money and if Voldemort wanted his hands then he’d have to keep them alive first.

The silence in his head was strained then, teetering on the edge authoritarianism and pragmatism, and he could just feel how dearly the younger Voldemort wanted to push him past breaking. Like he really was just some tool to be used, a set of hands when Voldemort himself didn’t have any, and it would have been easier if it was that way but it wasn’t and so they both had to deal with it.

_“You never would have said this to him.”_ The thought wasn’t cutting, but rather soft, and almost hesitant.

Nevertheless Harry felt something knocked out of him.

_“No, I guess I wouldn’t.”_

As a general rule they tried to avoid directly bringing up the older Voldemort that had lived in Harry’s head. It was too raw for both of them.

It’d only been a few months, but then, he’d been the only real friend Harry had ever had. Draco had been great, and sometimes the other Slytherins, but they’d always been playing some political game or just up to something in general. There was always scheming with Voldemort but he was honest about it, there were no real games, or feeling that it was all somehow an act. He was real in a way that no one else Harry had ever met was.

He had not even really gotten the chance to say goodbye, only that moment of panic, but then they’d thought that they’d both be going that it was the end for everyone. It seemed so wrong though that Harry had somehow come back and he hadn’t; he felt hollow.

Like he’d left the absence of himself behind so that everyone had to stare at the hole where he used to be.

The younger Voldemort’s voice cut into his thoughts, sharp words that had a far deeper undercurrent of emotion running through them, although Harry couldn’t name what feeling it was.

_“Tomorrow go find yourself a job; I’m sure some shop around here will be willing to hire a boy to sweep the floors or shelve the books.”_

And that was the end of that.

Dispelling the wards on one of the unmarked floor boards, Harry reached and pried it up, plucking the red stone from its resting place in the room and bringing it to the center of the pentacle.

He closed his eyes, breathing out and dispelling out any distracting thoughts, in his head he ran over the runes that had been necessary as well as the alchemic theory that had gone along with it. Sustained and overpowered transfiguration, creating a body from the dust and particles of air that were in the room, holding it with the energy that came from transitioning forms and binding it with the stone.

A more muggle method than Voldemort usually liked to try, but then, the more magical obvious methods hadn’t really been getting them anywhere either. As opinionated as Voldemort was about some things ultimately he was more practical; he didn’t care where the solution came from so long as it worked. 

_“Anuz, gebo, eihwaz, mannaz, raido, opala, dagaz, jera, sowilo…”_ All in various succession, winding about each other like a labyrinth, cloistering around the various circles drawn onto the floor.

They had originally started with words, stringed Latin chants, but these later attempts were more silent starting instead with that feeling of power drifting from his fingertips. Magic moving through him, circulating with each heartbeat like waves on a shore, and he let it surge picturing in his head the body of Tom Riddle they were attempting to create.

The image came from both of them at this point, a silent but well-worn conversation, of limbs and facial features, of feeling and nervous systems, Voldemort displayed in such a physical and human fashion that was so familiar to them now that neither even mentioned it.

It was pale and sweating that he opened his eyes some time later, letting the magic drift away along with the image of the human Voldemort had once been, and as he had suspected there was still only a red stone on the floor.

There would be more attempts, in that day alone even, he would not be allowed to give up then even though Harry instinctively knew that it would not work. They would substitute runes, redraw the circles, work through and around the basic theory until it seemed there was nothing left of it to twist about or change. Only when his knees were beyond aching and his sight blurred even beyond the glasses would he be allowed to stop and give up and just sleep.

It was in moments like these that he missed Hogwarts, not Hogwarts at the end, but Hogwarts somewhere in the middle. When he and Draco had become closer, when the other Slytherins had seemed to like him, when it had been him and classes and the stone had been so much further away. He missed the library, the flying lessons, he missed the people his age, he missed basic easy lessons in English, he missed Voldemort in his head, and sometimes he even missed having both Voldemorts in his head with that distracting forum that was always going on.  

But then, most of those things couldn’t exist together, or at least not for very long. Hogwarts couldn’t be Hogwarts with Voldemort inside it just as Voldemort couldn’t be himself inside Hogwarts; existing together had caused everything to collapse like it had at the end of the year. It had been so short though and he had hoped, even as he realized now that hoping was pointless, that it could have lasted a little longer than it did. 

Tomorrow, he thought to himself with a sigh, he would have to get a job.


	3. Chapter 3

The Fall of Magical Britain and the Subsequent Rise of the British Magical Empire

Harry James Potter

* * *

Excerpt

* * *

Despite popular opinion the dark lord is not afraid of Albus Dumbledore.

I can understand why the belief spread. There are various events from the dark lord’s personal history, which I’m not going to describe here out of fear that he might remove my head if he found it in print, that could lead to an explanation but the evidence that people lean to the most lies in the 1970’s during the height of his movement.

The dark lord never went after Dumbledore, never confronted him directly, would battle with his underlings in the Order of the Phoenix but was usually quick to retreat if Dumbledore himself showed up.

This quickly was labelled by the propaganda machine as fear, that the dark lord was afraid of Dumbledore in the way that he was no other witch or wizard.

Fear is a strong word though, it is not fear to be cautious, to pick your battles and know the strengths and weaknesses of your enemies. Acknowledgement of another’s prowess isn’t fear. It isn’t fear to keep aces up your sleeves and wait for opportunity.

But nobody asks the dark lord or if they do they tend to not believe him.

It’s comforting to believe that there is a savior for the light, a man that we can all look to and say “Thank Merlin, he will protect us.” We are familiar with good versus evil, the light versus the dark, and when given the opportunity we will gravitate towards the ideas even when barely supported. We had a dark lord ergo we must have a light one as well. 

It was there during Grindelwald’s campaign, the evil dark German wizard versus the good light English Dumbledore, and it will be there again. What an enviable thing, isn’t it? To somehow capture that label of ‘the good’.

The trouble is that if you take a step back, if you step out of Britain only for a moment, and if you peer at it through a window it’s difficult to see light or dark.

Dumbledore has murdered children.

Tell me, at the end of things, beyond measures like the greater good and means to ends how can one possibly justify such actions as being light?

In the end, after many years, I have decided that I have no choice but to believe in one of the dark lord’s more controversial statements.

There is no good, there is no evil, there is only power.

* * *

Prague 1992

* * *

News from England was sometimes slow in coming to the continent.

Harry had already found a job at an apothecary as a clerk by the time he’d heard anything about Harry Potter’s fate.

He and Voldemort had discovered, much to Voldemort’s irritation, that Europe didn’t really care about England.

Wizarding Britain was viewed more as a rabid dog than a country. Something that should probably be put down, be kept away from the children, but mostly as something no one wanted to touch.

After a bit of thought Voldemort pinned it down to Grindelwald's sweep through Europe, _“The states in the continent were devastated by Grindelwald's campaign, he obliterated at least a third of the population, killing off blood traitors and mudbloods alike. Now blood purism is a bit taboo which is beyond idiocy as that wasn’t the point of the damned thing. Grindelwald never reached England though so we have no such inhibitions.”_

Harry wasn’t sure Voldemort was completely right but Harry hadn’t been willing to argue not having been there himself. Either way people in Czechoslovakia didn’t think about England and English problems nearly as much as either one of them had expected. People knew of Harry Potter, knew his name, and there was some curiosity about him but no one would recognize him on the street or even in a photograph. 

Harry felt this really put things into perspective, Voldemort just felt a little insulted, as if he should have spread his wings farther and faster so that everyone knew and feared his name. It was hard for him to imagine a world where he hadn’t succeeded more so to see a world where no one even cared.

Either way it was towards the end of July, only a few days before his thirteenth birthday, that he found out exactly what Dumbledore had decided to do about Harry James Potter. He had been shelving the books in the store. There weren’t many, it was an apothecary and not a book store, but there were a few that the old potions mistress liked to keep on display to sell at an exuberant price.

She was in the back office brewing the various orders that had come in, she was very different from Snape, not necessarily friendly but mostly indifferent to his presence. When he had first shown up asking for work she’d taken a few looks at him, had tilted his head and inspected his eyes behind his glasses, and had said he was good enough if he picked up German fast.

She paid him enough to live on and only appeared a few times a day to mutter at him in German, which he sometimes understood and mostly didn’t, and then sigh and repeat herself in English.

He supposed it was fine but it was also kind of lonely, like it was still just he and the younger Voldemort, and like nothing had really changed.

_“Money is money, for Merlin’s sake Harry not everyone has to like you.”_ Voldemort snapped, every second not spent on the stone was an irritation to him like it was time wasted.

There was also something he hated about the need to be liked, not that Harry was going to call it a need but it would be nice all the same if he had someone to talk to. Maybe it was because Voldemort seemed to have been there and done that, before going into the diary, Harry could never catch all the details but there had definitely been a time when Voldemort was very charming to those around him even when he hated all of them.

_“It was a means to an end.”_ He would always shortly respond whenever those thoughts drifted into Harry’s head.

He placed an aged Potion textbook, one on experimentation with aquatic magical herbs, on the shelf and marked the price he had been told on the binding in clear magical writing that would fade with purchase.

She did appreciate how handy he was with magic, at the very least.

It was around then that the shop bell rang and a customer walked in.

“Gutten morgen.” Harry beamed down at the man and stepped down from the ladder and then began asking how he might help.

Harry’s German wasn’t necessarily good but it was passable and after working in the shop it had improved immensely. It was enough to get the ingredients the man requested and to tell him when the potion he had ordered would be finished and reassure him that the Czech ministry was well aware of how long these things took to brew.

It was even enough for small talk at the register but it wasn’t enough for the name Harry Potter echoing like a gunshot through the room.

“Ach was?” He asked and the man repeated himself Harry having to interrupt half-way through, “Englisch, auf Englisch, sie bitte.”

“Oh, sorry,” The man said giving him a polite smile before repeating himself, “The newspaper says that English boy, the boy who lived, Harry Potter has gone missing.”

“Missing?” Harry asked because he had expected dead or fugitive or something, not up in the air like missing.

_“Oh, that is very clever.”_ Voldemort commented in Harry’s head and for a moment it was as if Harry’s head was on fire and his scar began to simmer in pain. Harry resisted the urge to rub the pain away and instead focused on the man as he continued to talk.

“Ja, the Hogwarts Defense professor is suspected of having kidnapped him as he is missing as well. The English keep him out of sight for ten years, not even knowing where he is, and then in a year manage to lose him. A boy who killed a dark lord, how do you lose such a thing? It would never happen in this country.”

The sad thing was, from what Harry had seen of Prague, that was probably true. Had Harry been German, instead of English, he probably would have been sent to Durmstang. He would have lived with magical people, people who didn’t call him a freak and lock him in cupboards, and he probably wouldn’t have been killed by his own headmaster.

Things like that didn’t seem to happen in Prague.

“Well, you know the English.” Harry commented with a bitter smile, his head still reeling from the words. The man gave him an odd look, Harry after all clearly was English, but then shrugged figuring that since Harry was working at a shop in Prague he clearly wasn’t _that_ English.

And he wasn’t, not anymore.

When the man left with his purchases, after Harry watched him leave and enter back into the magical district, he and Tom talked about what it all meant.

_“Why would he say I was missing, instead of dead or worse?”_ Harry asked and he almost felt the younger Voldemort sneering at him for not understanding right away.

_“If he claims you were dead it would be devastating for the nation. There would be riots, Hogwarts would come under quite a bit of scrutiny perhaps even be shut down. Not to mention there would be the slight problem if you were found and were not dead as he no doubt knows you are. However labeling an eleven year old as a fugitive, as being the dark lord incarnate, would be equally disastrous as well as completely ridiculous. Perhaps a few conspiracy theorists might pick it up, you might see it headlining in the Quibbler, but no reasonable sane wizard would look at the boy who lived and see me.”_ Voldemort summarized sounding more like a standard text book than a person, as if this was all elementary, something Harry should have mastered ages ago.

_“But why missing?”_

_“Easy, if you’re missing people will look for you and when they find you they will shout it from the roof tops. Now Dumbledore has a search party of thousands, and if one of them finds you they’ll deliver you straight to him. With a few minor exceptions of course.”_

That night he started packing everything up and leaving, getting out while the going was good, because it seemed as if every time he turned around the headmaster was there in his shadow.

Wasn’t it funny how Albus Dumbledore never terrified him before he died? Well, he supposed it was understandable because death was so far away when you weren’t actually dying. But Voldemort had always been wary of Dumbledore, not quite afraid, but definitely not willing to confront him head on especially with Harry as the mediator; shouldn’t that have been enough of a sign? He’d been wary of Dumbledore, he hadn’t trusted him, but he hadn’t been afraid either.

It said a lot that Voldemort was the voice of reason that night, _“Calm down, if we leave now that will get us nowhere.”_

_“We could go further east; you said we might have to get into China somehow, maybe to muggle Hong Kong…”_ Harry rambled packing up the few belongings they had as he tried to picture the globe in his head and where was very far away from headmasters and being buried alive.

_“We are not leaving! This is the act of a desperate man, people have been asking where you are and he’s run out of time to stall, this means he has already looked and already failed to find you.”_

Harry hands paused for a moment but he continued to pack. Dumbledore, with Voldemort temporarily out of commission, was the most powerful wizard Harry knew of. Voldemort could resent that fact all he wanted but the older more experienced version of himself was dead and this one didn’t even have a body.

As they’d found out last time Harry Potter really wasn’t a match for Dumbledore.

_“I need more time.”_ This time Harry really did stop, stunned by the admission, _“I can’t sit down and think like I need to if we’re moving across the continent. I need more time here.”_

Harry sighed and sat on the floor, looking out the window to the street lamps and crescent moon, it was a clear warm night the kind of night that wrapped around you like a blanket. If he looked closely into the glass he could see his own reflection, still pale, still small, and still very thin but all the same he looked very different than he had only a year before.

_“Are we even close?”_ Harry asked.

There was a pause as Voldemort considered it, considered how to best phrase his response, and then, _“Closer than we were.”_

_“Alright, we’ll stay.”_

After that Harry made sure to read the papers daily, his head always aching after trying to make it through the German text, and most of it were on Czech affairs or those of nearby countries but sometimes there were updates on wizarding Britain.

He got his eyes fixed, to get rid of the trademark glasses, and it was so odd waking up in the morning with everything clear and bright instead of blurred. He didn’t change anything else in case the potion’s mistress or the customers noticed and started asking questions but the glasses seemed to be enough.

Voldemort explained it after a few days when no one had seemed to spot him.

_“You’ve noticed this before but people see what they wish to see. They expect to find the boy who lived being tortured by a kidnapper, they expect to see the scar right away, they expect the glasses, but most importantly they don’t expect him to be a poor foreign school boy working in a shop. People aren’t looking for you here.”_

Either way there was nothing like that first day in Diagon Alley where everyone was pointing and staring and asking if they could please shake his hand. People went on with their business, asked for their potions, and left Harry alone.

So they kept a wary eye on the papers, listened in the streets for English accents, and continued to work incessantly on the solution to Voldemort’s body problem.

They moved onto elixirs and potions, Harry really wished they had stayed in the realm of Transfiguration.

Transfiguration didn’t demand test subjects.

They were in the flat when Voldemort first brought it up, he’d probably had the idea for days, but he’d waited until Harry had almost relaxed; almost stopped looking over his shoulder for Voldemort, until the nightmares were just about being buried alive instead of being murdered. He’d waited until he felt Harry had it in him to be reasonable, as if this was something you could be reasonable about, and then when they were alone he’d started talking.

Harry was horrified.

_“Believe me, Harry, if I could use you as a guinea pig I would have already; unfortunately I happen to live inside your head so I need that to remain intact.”_ Voldemort noted in a tone that was more amused than frustrated, an odd occurrence given his foul mood recently, as if Harry’s panic was something to be laughed.

Sure, Voldemort hadn’t exactly been overly enthused about the idea either, he didn’t like the idea of grotesquely mutated things any more than Harry did but Voldemort was also practical to the point of monstrosity. The older Voldemort wouldn’t have even blinked, the younger Voldemort thought about it and decided it was for the best.

Means to ends, everything was means to ends with Voldemort.

_“I’m not going to do it!”_ Harry protested, feeling as if it would do nothing at all but meaning it all the same, because he wasn’t going to do it.

He’d do a lot of things for Voldemort, he’d done many things for Voldemort, but Voldemort had never asked him to kill anyone before and Harry wasn’t about to start.

_“It’s not murder.”_

But it was murder, murder if it went wrong, that was the whole point! Using someone else in case it went wrong because it probably would because it usually did go wrong! It was so easy to picture too, that’s what was terrifying, he’d seen it before after all. He’d seen Quirrell’s limp body hanging in Dumbledore’s grasp and then that flash of green light before his own eyes, he knew what murder looked like.

_“It is not the same.”_

Funny, Harry thought to himself, because he was sure Dumbledore probably had the exact same justification for doing what he had. For the greater good, he’d probably said to himself right before he offed Quirrell and then offed Harry.

_“It is not the same and you know it!”_

They both stopped for a moment, listening to those words echo in his head. And both thought, almost at the same time, that the older Voldemort probably wouldn’t have even bothered with the justification. He would have just done it.

Harry knew why Voldemort was pushing for it, and if he calmed down to think about it, why he felt like he could. If you looked around there really were some worthless people hanging about, people nobody would miss, and wasn’t it better that the world have Voldemort who actually had things to do and accomplish than it was to have them?

The Dursleys were always the first to come to mind with this thought. Harry hadn’t been about to throw them in Azkaban, mostly not to allow other muggles to be thrown in there, but all the same if he had to trade them for someone else. If he had to trade their lives for the only friend he had…

In the end Voldemort had one final argument.

_“If you don’t do it then Dumbledore will come, he will find you, and he will kill you just like he did before; and maybe this time you won’t get back up.”_

The next morning Harry had started working on the elixir as per Voldemort’s careful instructions. He watched as the thick red liquid bubbled, and he couldn’t help but wonder even while he watched, what exactly it would taste like as it ran down his throat.

When it was done he placed it into various vials, labeling them carefully, and stored them away for safe keeping.

And there they would remain, until later, when he would manage to find a suitable test subject.

**Author's Note:**

> This is a work written a while ago that I've let slip by but should come back to at some point, a sequel to Tozette's "Hit the Ground Running". Due to circumstances I'm not privy to, Tozette removed "Hit the Ground Running" from all legitimate sites I know of, and because of that I can't in good conscience offer you a link (though if you dig around for it I'm sure you'll find it somewhere.)
> 
> That said I do take a very different approach than Tozette and possibly had wildly different ideas, though I do defer to the original for characterization starting points.
> 
> That said, I have exactly three chapters of this and since no one has been clamoring for updates it will likely stay that way for some times.
> 
> Thanks for reading, comments, kudos, and bookmarks are greatly appreciated.


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